Response 4

Identifying what we mean by ‘truth’ is crucial to answering the question of whether or not artworks communicate truth. For Aristotle, the best art is a kind that is well constructed. In his discussion of tragedy, he highlights the importance of plot and character—that the events, actions, and thoughts included in the play be ‘realistic’—and coherent with some kind of order in the play. By realistic, I do not mean that plays depict something as mundane and probabilistic as ordinary life; rather, I mean that the goings-on in a play should fit the tone of the work (indeed, one of the challenges of the playwright is to create something that has a tone first and foremost, and secondly to ensure that its tone is consistent). Thus plays, like other forms of art, need to fit within certain rules; they must have a universe of their own, and must make sense within it. Part of that sensibility is moral; thus Oedipus is an appealing character because his decisions make sense to us—he tries to follow the ‘rules’ of being a good person—but his failings are also understandable to us. They do not seem unnaturally contrived, nor do we find ourselves frustrated from engaging with the play by Sophocles artifice. Instead, Sophocles inspires horror and revulsion in us at the same time as he evokes pity; we are able to identify with Oedipus because we are able to apprehend the rules of his universe and how they might be modified to fit our own lives. Yet at the same time that we recognize this truth, we are intended to experience relief, a catharsis: the reality of our lives is (it is to be hoped) far better than that of Oedipus. We recognize the ‘truth’ of his situation—it is understandable within its rules, and it can be understood in terms of principles we derive and recognize from our own lives and experiences—but we also recognize a truth about our own lives: they are not that, but they could be. It is the fact that they are not that is so freeing.

            Nietzsche views art differently. For Nietzsche, art is an escape from truth to terrible for us to grapple with. We want to be alive, he realizes, in a fundamental way that we cannot escape from. But an essential part of being alive is wanting more. Pain and suffering are inevitable; but we live for the joyous moments, holding out hope against whatever mathematical odds, and never quite weighing in the real calculations of how much of our live we spend in pleasure and how much in pain. Art is a distraction; it is a manifestation of our will to truth, to power, but it is a diverting one. It diverts us by channeling out desires and changing the world, so to speak, so that what we desire is no longer inaccessible. In a Nietzschean sense, art is about blending an intelligible order with unbridled feeling and changing our experience of the world—or perhaps more accurately, opening the possibility of different experiences that will satisfy our appetites in illusory yet meaningful ways

            Heidegger’s conception of truth is similar to Nietzsche’s in that it deals with getting closer to ‘truth’ through experience. In Heidegger’s conception, we lose sight of truth when we over-examine an object and take it outside of its original purpose. Equipment thus loses its ‘equipment-ness’ when we begin asking ‘what makes this equipment?’ Yet art gets us to truth, and art asks us to examine something to the precise extent that is required to get a picture (so to speak) of the art. I see this unfolding as follows: when viewing art we do not, at first, ask ‘what makes this art?’ Not if we are approaching it in the right way, at any rate. Instead, we simply experience it. We apprehend it. We consider it, but only in a way of taking in what is there to be offered. That is how we are to interact with art. If an object, like a tool, or a pair of shoes, is represented, then we may consider meaning behind it—truth, if you will. But the truth itself is simply in recognizing those objects for what they are; after that, individual thoughts will differ based on a variety of factors, but so long as they are reasonably relevant (prompted by something that actually has to do with what’s being represented, and not simply being wrong, like calling a pair of shoes an elephant), they are part of the truth of our experience of that object. But we are not examining the object in that case; we are examining the work of art, whose purpose is to be examined. We thus protect ourselves from overstepping the boundaries—our understanding of tools themselves is not broken by our considering what makes them tools. We do not prevent the object from being itself in its fullest sense by being too aware of it. Instead, we examine the artwork, and are aware of what it is, and recognize the object within it. This in turn gives rise to associations. The ‘truth’ of this kind of artwork then is in a movement between concealing and revealing, as dictated by the concept of aletheia. What is concealed is the construction of the art, the real story of the object in the painting, a hyper-awareness of the object. What is revealed is an intuitive understanding of the object and the myriad connections and inferences we have been led by our experience to make about it.

            If art reveals truth—and I think it does—it does so by evoking reasonably well informed responses in the proper mindset. This may consist of apprehending certain rules governing the ‘game’ or ‘craft’ of art—Aristotle, Plato, Gadamer, Dickie, and Kant all deal with this concept—or in getting us to take a certain vantage point from which our thought’s direction is guided. In the latter case, I think of Hume, Kant, Aristotle, and Nietzsche in particular. The shaping of thought—not directly by the artist, but intentionally indirectly through the evocation of personally relevant mental connections, is where the experience of truth comes in relation to art.